you nailed it (Score 2)

This is a pretty accurate summary of how you actually do real web development, and why wordpress sites (that are not priimarily blog oriented) suck. The problem is and always has been amateur or incompetent web 'designers', they used to make Flash sites, remember those?, because all they could do was flash, now they make these wordpress/jquery monstrosities, both are dead ends for the client, since it's very hard to impossible to maintain the stuff over time, and it's almost always a bad way to do a real site, though, exactly as with Flash, they look nice and shiny when you first see them. Developers think of that type of problem, designers don't, and that's how you can tell if you are a designer type or a developer type. Now, if all you have are small time clients, who cares what you use, the ones that are serious will learn and fix the mistake by going more pro, the ones who don't, will stay small, the rest will end up with what they always end up with in the end, nothing.

For the guy who said you don't know what you're talking about, re hand coding the photoshop design, that is a clear indication he/she has no clue about what they are talking about, since this is how you do it if you are a pro. Anyone who uses export to html from any software product and believes that's a good idea is obviously an amateur or a typical web designer trying to be a web developer but not knowing how to code.

If I explain to a client the role of a designer, I will tell them, they are about 1 to 5% of the project, and they follow what we tell them to do. As time goes on, and with real web development, the site does in fact go on, not grind down into a steaming pile, that percentage gets smaller and smaller. The developer{s) is (are) the rest. I have actually gotten good code from designers by the way, clean high quality css/html 5, because we spec'ed css/html5 as a requirement, took a few tries to find someone competent though, so I'm not going to diss all designers, just most of them. And the ones that understand the work flow, design to specs, hand off design to those who code the design, implement as a template, are also great to work with, so it's really just this niche of 'designers' who have no clue how to do anything but still try to make sites, that are the problem, but even they are fine since the web will always have this low end thing, that successful people/site owners come away from after being burned a few times by it.

A quality CMS that is picked to meet the needs of a client, which is the correct choice for almost all websites that are not blogs (and wordpress with good clean templating is a good choice for a blog, I would use that too), is a fine way to make sites. But the problem is, a quality cms is sort of hard to run, and not always easy to update/upgrade. And too many people view the choice as wordpress or drupal, both of which are awful choices for most websites, unless you are running a blog or a huge heavy traffic heavy content update type site like, whitehouse.gov, for example. Between that are many options, some, like Modx, are developer oriented, and really a joy to run, but just happen to create by default exactly what most site owners actually want, a cleanly templated and easy to update and operate website that is a hierarchically organized collection of resources with a standard navigation to access them, that office staff can run by themselves, with the developer just adding features as required by the admin staff. I was somewhat amazed when I started seeing these wordpress monstrosities appearing, it was instantly obvious based on the terrible templating and implementation that these would inevitably fail on upgrades at some point because of too many conflicting extensions etc, besides being terribly slow and absurdly inefficient.

But as with all bad designer fads, as clients realize they are left with unusable junk, this fad too, like flash sites before them, will fade away, and the site operators who are going to succeed long term will move to professional solutions, and the great wheel of the internet will keep turning. Then we will get the next fad, and the next.

When you pick a tool for a job, you base the selection on what the client needs, and not on the fact that all you know how to do is setup a blog platform with a hacked on 'pages' element that was really never meant to make more than a few static page elements on a blog, and it does that well by the way. Sadly too many designers only know how to do it one way, so clients end up getting screwed with just junk as always has been the case, but on the bright side, if you treat it as a filter that will remove future failures on the web, it works great as is, so no need to change a thing.

The bright side, of course, is the fewer people who know how to do actual web development, the more money you can make if you know how to do it well, and the greater your long term career prospects, which is something to think about as you sit clicking your add/install buttons on your wordpress site you have no idea how to do a thing with without your guis and other crutches.

If I were younger I'd write a super basic and highly modular cms that would create basic websites the way 99% of users want them, then add modules to add features, but it's too much work and other solutions are fine as is so there's no real need, but it's sad that wordpress became the go to default for people who don't know any better.